


Empty Space Between

by HerenorThereNearnorFar



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Aftermath, Gen, Post Season 2, Season/Series 02 Spoilers, Team Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 04:01:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9417602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HerenorThereNearnorFar/pseuds/HerenorThereNearnorFar
Summary: Voltron rebuilds, and despite everything, Allura leads.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Edit: Apparently the whole fic didn't post the first time, so I tried to reconstruct the last quarter.

"When we rescue Shiro," Keith said, "I'm going to punch him in the face for leaving us. That'll show him."

Pidge lifted her head off the floor just long enough to glare at him, "Because clearly we can only communicate our emotions through punching."

Allura wiped the sweat off her forehead. The rest of the paladins were scattered around her like broken dolls, fallen warriors craving, as Pidge had put it, "the sweet release of death, or, like, a nap". She was the only one still on her feet. "Paladins, please. We're not going to get him back unless we're in top fighting form. We need Voltron. Now, let's go through the poses again."

"What are we going to do," Lance asked, "Yoga the Black Lion into accepting a new paladin?"

"It's an ancient Altean meditative technique," Allura said with a scowl, "And I haven't seen any of you come up with better ideas." She surveyed the training room floor darkly. No one seemed like they were about to jump to attention. Keith was leaning against a wall, head lolling back, staring at the ceiling like he could see Shiro in it. Hunk and Lance were back to back, sliding from sitting to prone at an alarming rate. Pidge was lying on the ground, cheek pressed against the cool metal. 

They didn't look like the best hope for the universe. They looked young. 

"When we rescue Shiro," Hunk said softly, "I'm going to give him a hug. The biggest hug ever. Then I'm going to plant a tracker on him."

"Like a microchip," Pidge agreed. "Subcutaneous. He'll never escape us again."

Allura gave up and slid to the floor next to them. She folded her legs neatly, and missed having a dress to arrange around her. She'd practically been living in her battle gear the past few weeks. Her scalp ached with the weight of her bun, the tension of keeping everything together. 

Perhaps orders weren't the way to go. Perhaps she needed to be diplomatic. 

Damn. She'd never been the best at diplomacy. She liked it, she liked it a lot, but it had never been as easy as fighting. It was never straightforward. Sometimes, diplomacy meant being unkind. Sometimes it meant being kind for the wrong reasons. 

"When Shiro comes back," Allura said, "I want him to be proud of what we've done in his absence. We all want that, I think. And while the lions are powerful alone, they're no match for the might of Voltron. We need the Black Lion. And we need someone we can trust to pilot it."

There were few options outside of her young paladins, and few she truly liked. What remained of the Blade of Marmora had offered her any number of skilled warriors, but she was still hesitant to put a Galra soldier in the cockpit of one of her father's lions. Keith was one thing, the Blades were another. Coran was scouting allied systems for someone reliable, someone who could fill the fifth vacancy, but she found the prospect of one of her paladins in control of the Black Lion to be most palatable. They could switch things around, if need be, but she did not want another Zarkon. She wanted someone she could trust.

(Of course, her father had trusted Zarkon once as well.)

"We've tried," Lance said, "We all have. Coran has. That lion is dead in its hangar. The forcefield hasn't even come back on. Maybe we're going around things the wrong way."

Allura crossed her arms and gave Lance the most regal glare she could muster. "How do you mean?"

"I don't know," Lance muttered, mirroring her stance, "Maybe we should be **looking** for Shiro instead of trying to replace him?"

So that was what this was about. She was all to aware that all attention was on her now. Even Pidge had twisted to look at her with half open eyes. Allura breathed out through her nose, resisted the urge to pull her hair out of its bun and scream. "We are looking for him," she said firmly. "We've scanned every frequency, searched the entire known universe for any sign of his armor. Nothing is coming up. Coran has heard nothing, the Blade has heard nothing. We can't find a trace..." something caught in the back of her through, like her words had snagged on an inconvenient outcropping of emotion.  "We are looking, you know that. But in the meantime, we need to be prepared for the Galra's next strike. We need to keep fighting."

"We do," Keith agreed from his wall of solitude, "But this just isn't working." Hunk groaned in agreement, before toppling over and taking Lance down with him. Lance didn't even make protest the sudden change in orientation. He accepted his horizontal fate with dignity. 

She was well aware that they were overacting their exhaustion. She also knew dramatics sometimes held a grain of truth. She hadn't grown up with Coran without realizing that. 

"All right, Paladins. Circle up, we'll do some mental exercises, and then you're free."

There were moans, but they all crawled- or in Pidge's case rolled- into what was more or less a circle. With a bit more urging Allura even got them all sitting up. 

Lance glanced around with eyes that were sharper than his hunched posture might have suggested, "Circle time. Is anyone else getting pre-school flashbacks?"

"Yeah," Hunk said. "I think it's the space age architecture, uncomfortable clothing, and mysteriously missing friend." Allura was pretty sure he was joking, but sometimes it was hard to tell with Hunk. 

Two claps got the paladins looking at her again. "Alright. Five minutes, then I promise you can go. Everyone, close their eyes."

"Are you going to tell us to think of the ocean?" Pidge complained, "I hate those exercises. And the ocean."

"The Black Lion has nothing to do with the ocean," she said sharply, "It has everything to do with space. And leadership."

"You and Shiro's things, not ours." Keith said, and sounded more than a little frustrated. He had been the first one to try to get the Black Lion working. Shiro had apparently asked him to take over, if something happened. 

(Alteans had believed in destiny, and that the truly wise could read the path of the universe by feeling the quintessence underlying it all. Humans were not very wise in the ways of energy, as far as Allura could tell, but perhaps they had a way with destiny. Or perhaps Shiro had just been a bit of a fatalist. She wasn't prepared to rule out either.)

"Bear with me," Allura told them. "Imagine your lion. The bond you share with them, the way you feel when you're in battle. Imagine the way you first felt when you saw them, how you knew the controls before you even saw them."

She'd grown up on stories of the innate bond between a lion and its paladin. She'd could picture it the same way she could picture her father's face. Voltron was a part of her as much as it was a part of them.

"Now, I want you to think about duty. Because that's what this is. A lion, once bonded, does not let go of its paladin easily. But this is not a severing, it is a transference. It's a temporary shift, just until we find Shiro." The Black Lion thrived on power, on respect, on sacrifice. That was what she had always been told. She was sure she would only respect someone who came not to take, but to give. "This is for Shiro. All of it."

It was not a lie. Even if Shiro really was dead, his memory was what drove them forward. 

Pidge's hands were clenched with determination. Keith was straining, like if he tried hard enough he could will Shiro into being. Hunk was on the verge of tears. 

Allura sighed. She didn't think they were getting anywhere. 

"Everyone can go. You've done enough for the day. Tomorrow morning we'll all go down to the hangar bay again and see if there's any change." 

Hunk and Lance hightailed it out, and Pidge followed at a more leisurely pace. Keith lingered. He was staring at Shiro's bayard, she realized, still lying on a trolley table from an attempt earlier at getting her paladins to use it. It had been futile, the bayard remained as inert as its lion. 

"It won't work," Keith said to himself, frustration edging his voice. "It hasn't worked so far. Nothing we do seems to help."

"We've done a lot, together." Allura reminded him. "And we haven't tried everything yet." It felt like she was reminding herself. She stretched. Her back ached, a sign that perhaps she had pushed the paladins too far. 

"I know, I know. It's just, I feel like we're not doing enough, like we're failing. And Shiro is still out there, somewhere, and I'm worried."

She wondered if _worried_ was teenage boy for _scared_. Fear of the unknown was natural for anyone, and Shiro's whereabouts were still a complete blank. In the quiet of the castle it was too easy to dwell on what-ifs and dark possibilities. If you stopped moving for even a moment, the weight of it all came crashing back down. Altea's ghosts were quiet ones. They quiet in silence and made it their eerie home.   
  
The mice helped her, usually, but they refused to go into the training rooms. She'd find them when she left, and fill her empty, fussing head with something, anything. There was an alliance to run, Slav to supervise, the broken remnants of rebel cells to piece back together. There was duty, and that meant she had something to feed herself to. 

"So am I. But we can't let fear blind us to the possibilities. We have to remain strong, and we have to have faith. Faith in Shiro and faith in ourselves. We've come along way, I don't think the universe is going to let us go now. That is not the way it unfolds. It can't be."

Keith's mouth turned up. "You're good at sounding certain about things."

Allura reached for the ceiling, heard her back pop a half a dozen times. "I've had a lot of practice. You should know Keith, the first part of leadership is remaining calm. You have to be able to see things clearly, and sometimes you need to be able to wait."

"'Patience yields focus'" Keith mumbled, and it sounded like a quote, something her father would have said. "'You need to be able to step away from things and look at the bigger picture' Maybe Shiro just stepped way too far away."

That stung, but she ignored it. "Go and get some rest," she advised. "Stress does not a clear head make, and we have a lot to do. The Galra Empire isn't going to defeat itself." 

"I know, I know" Keith said, and pressed his hands into his eyes, "I just keep having these dreams. Shiro is in them, he's trapped and he needs help and no matter how much I try I can't get to him. They're horrible."

Allura had not been raised to discount dreams, however Keith was mostly human. Their psychology was not Altean- she'd learned that the hard way early on- and nor were their abilities. Still, she couldn't help but wonder....

She dreamed sometimes, of Altea. Of her father and her friends, of soldiers and gardeners and artists long dead. She wondered if Shiro would join her dreams soon as well. It seemed strange, that one more body would matter against a mountain of corpses, but somehow every one hurt more. 

"I want you to tell me about your dreams, tomorrow," she decided, grabbing the bayard so he couldn't look mournfully at it anymore and hooking it onto the back of her belt. "When Coran returns, we'll discuss them together. In the meantime, clear your mind and take care of your body. It's what Shiro would want."

Keith looked almost soothed, it was hard to tell under his bangs. "If that's an order," he agreed quickly. 

"It is." 

He was halfway to the door when Lance slammed it open. 

"Hey Keith, Princess. We were looking for you. Hunk finally got the graphics on our video game rig to work in two dimensions, so I thought you guys might want to watch me demolish Pidge."

For some reason Keith looked to her for permission before answering, "Sure?"

"Great! Princess?"

"I thought you were too tired to work," Allura observed lightly. 

Lance waved his hands, "No, no, this is good old fashioned couch potato-ing. The opposite of work, really. No thought involved whatsoever. And... I thought it might help us get our minds off of things." 

It was technically what she wanted. Lance could at least pretend to be a little less gleeful about escaping training though. "Hmph. I want to check in on Slav first, and comm Coran to ask a few questions, but then I'll see about joining you." 

"Leadership calls, we get it," Lance said, slinging an arm around Keith's shoulder. "Come on, brood machine. We've unlocked the secret levels and everything." The two stumbled off, and then into a wall as Lance tried to get Keith in a headlock. There really was an amazing energy in freedom.

The second they were gone she let her hair down. The easing of the ever-present tension was heavenly, and she combed her fingers through her hair a few times just to enjoy it, before setting down the halls. She didn't want to go to her room to put the bayard back, so she left it on her belt. The weight of it and the swing of her hair against her back almost filled up the emptiness of the hallways. 

It was still too quiet. 

A shout echoed down the hall followed by an insistent electronic beeping that slipped into a song. 

Maybe not so quiet after all. 

 

 

 


End file.
